The Daily Lie

The newspaper has a headline – Baryshnikov shelanu – Our Baryshnikov. It is impossible in English to convey the familial intimacy of shelanu in Hebrew because Hebrew unlike English is the language of a specific people, tribe, or nation. But it is these very qualities of intimacy and of belonging that are duplicitous. If the dancer belongs to anyone, it can only be to his parents or, perhaps, on good days, to his spouse. No one, however, belongs to a nation. A newspaper is not a rabbi praising a 13 year-old on the occasion of his Bar-Mitzvah. His success is his alone. In addition, Israel is not a nation only of Jews, and that shelanu reinforces the illusion that it is. There is an implicit segregation in newspaper coverage in Israel, a segregation that might have made sense 50 years ago but today only helps to reinforce national insularity: the Jews talk to the Jews; the Arabs talk to whomever, since most Jews cannot read Arabic and therefore, have no idea what secrets lie inside – for obviously, that segregation in news also leads to mutual distrust and misunderstanding.